265. LIVING LA VIDA JIHAD

From the Archives (15 November 2006) Stop42’s ad against raising the minimum wage in jihadist Colorado features Moses and the Judeo-Christian god:

MOSES: We need divine intervention. They want to chisel Amendment 42 into Colorado's constitution where it doesn't belong.
GOD: What on earth are you talking about?
MOSES: An annual minimum wage increase in stone for eternity!
GOD: When inflation and recession come, it will be a catastrophe!
MOSES: It's a plague we'll face every year.
GOD: We can't let the people make this mistake. Go. Spread the word. Vote no on 42!

In response to this ad, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that

perhaps God, for all his omniscience, hadn’t noticed that the states that already had higher minimum wages haven’t yet plunged into “inflation and recession.” Or that the 1997 hike in the federal minimum wage wasn’t followed by nationwide economic calamity. It’s stranger still that the deity would choose to weigh in on the side of the Colorado Restaurant Association and against the poor and downtrodden.

Or maybe no one noticed that, while Bush&Co may have convinced the so-called godly to support their imperialist policies for the past 6 years, even American jihadists seem to have wised up to the fake cowboys.

Word to Bush&Co: screw the people long enough and they will realize that they are being used.

They will also vote—at least in 24 states—to increase the minimum wage you reject in order to take care of their own.


(You know what they say: If the leaders won’t lead...)

But wait. There’s more post-election good news!

Bill Maher outed hypocritical RNC chair Ken Mehlman this past weekend Larry King Live. CNN managed to edit the segment out of later rebroadcasts but, hey, it was too late then.

So there you have it: another imperialist homophobic hypocrite unveiled (and how do they keep managing to convince people to promote legislature that adversely affects them?).

Lindsay Beyerstein notes on Alternet

The outing of Mehlman, after all these years, is proof of the institutional implosion of the Republican Party. Nobody wants to cover for a closeted gaybasher, and Mehlman is no longer powerful enough to command complicity.

Meanwhile, last week ultra-conservatives in Jerusalem forced organizers to cancel their Pride parade by clashing with the police, burning bins of trash, and throwing stones. The jihadists also announced that holding the parade would be “surrendering to mental illness” and, no big surprise, declared queerness a crime.

(Ah, they do like to pretend that they get to define the law of the land for everyone, don’t they?)

The irony of their throwing stones is definitely not lost on Medea, but don’t you wonder why an army as well-trained as Israel’s couldn’t quell a few fundie trash-burners? Obviously, the will to defend queers just wasn’t there.

So there we have it: another example of jihadists using selective Bible verses to further their cause.

Meanwhile, Pam’s Spaulding notes that the Houston landscaping bidness Garden Guy Inc. (“Treating you with respect and honesty are the cornerstones of our reputation”) picked up $40K in new bidness but lost a mere $1K in bidness (that’s 2 customers) after e-mailing a queer client to inform him that Garden Guy Inc. chooses not to work for homosexuals.

“Why can’t people handle it when you say the truth?” co-owner Sabrina Farber asked after receiving angry e-mails and phone calls in response to her actions.

Indeed Sabrina. Why can’t you handle the fact that, when you exhibit hate, then outrage gets flung right back atcha? It’s called a vicious cycle, Hon, and, guess what, you're on the side of hate and intolerance and you got called on it. Publicly.

So take note: You and your homophobic husband have just provided the world with yet another example of why US courts are still required to enforce protection of minority groups in this land of the (purported) free where jihadists such as yourself target others based on irrational and religion-stoked hate.

Meanwhile, a chorus pal who is selling her condo recently discovered that some asshole broke in, shit on her floors, and left a Watchtower with scribbled homophobic messages on it for her reading enjoyment.

(FYI Sabrina. That’s a hate crime. And it invokes public outrage, even down here in the Southland.)

•

So. My obvious segue here is to thank all those prognosticators who wrote off liberal southerners as dispendable irrational irrelvant hicks. But thanks really are not enough. So I’ll invite them to read Bob Moser’s “New Southern Strategy” in the Nation instead. (You know, the article that begins “The South—aka “Jesusland”—has a message for those national Democratic wizards who advised writing off the South: ... Fuck you.”)

Check it out at http://www.alternet.org/stories/44085/

•

Meanwhile, Jamie had her first chemo treatment yesterday and I was relieved to see her out and about and cracking jokes afterwards—particularly because Tree's first treatment went so badly. A relief too to hear her laughing too. “You pulled the C card, didn’t you?” she said to her ex (who, indeed, sis pull the C card to get what she wanted, as she said, laughing back).

Guess you gotta remember to laugh when the world throws you the stinkin' C ball.

224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS

“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times

From the Archives

(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.

And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.

(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.

(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)

Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”

He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.

(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)

Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.

Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)

Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.

Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.

Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?

Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.

SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”

READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.

181. DIVINE PUNISHMENT, OR, WAS JESUS A NAMBY-PAMBY FRAT BOY?

From the Archives

(January 2006) Wasting no time whatsoever, Pat Robertson announced yesterday that Ariel Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment for “dividing God’s land.”

Interesting how egomaniacs always want you to believe that they speak for god, isn’t it?

(What was Terry Schiavo’s coma divine punishment for, Patso?)

As for me, I’m holding onto the hope that Pat’s latest decree will inspire Oral Roberts to climb back into his crystal tower and refuse to come down until God delivers a Jim Jones poison Kool-Aid acid test to the idiots over at the 700 Club.

(And, man, I can’t WAIT till Pat finally dies so I can announce his death as God’s wrath pouring down on the Christianists.)
Meanwhile, Pat and his pals are pressuring NBC to bump the “Book of Daniel,” which premieres Friday.

This show stars Aidan Quinn as an Episcopal priest with a queer son, and the Christianists consider it another indication of NBC’s “anti-Christian bigotry.”

The fact that a gay man produced the show no doubt encourages this view too. And they’re particularly unhappy about the fact that the priest has long conversations with Jesus.

(Wonder who’s playing Jesus? Maybe they revived that Jesus of Montreal star.)

I fail to parse how a sitcom that features Jesus in a starring role can be labeled anti-Christian, but a Dobson spokesperson describes this Jesus is “a namby-pamby frat boy who basically winks at every sin and perversity under the sun.”

What would they have him do with human foibles? Shoot electric lightning bolts out of his pinkies?

Clearly, they want that black-and-white Old Testament god instead of a human who recognizes subtllety, frailty.

Meanwhile, the empathetic namby-pamby Jesus must be thrilled to see Tom DeLay on trial and the Boy King’s feet pressed to the fire and Abramoff’s so-called charitable giving coming back to bite him and those other conservative moneychangers on their lily-white asses.

And, low and behold, Abramoff’s plea agreement reveals that he funneled $50,000 to the wife of one of DeLay’s senior staff members (a woman who is probably in some Texas church right now praying her well-perfumed ass off that some higher being will get her out of this one).

The whipster god must be chuckling at the fundies’ misuse of the word family too, now that we know that DeLay’s former chief of staff apparently created the US Family Network nonprofit in order to receive $1 million from an Abramoff client.

Oh and I bet he’s happy as a clam to know that Randy Cunningham is finally headed to prison and we all know now that Bill Frist (who can diagnose patients from a video) uses his AIDS charity to funnel half a million dollars to his pals and allegedly pulled a Martha and sold some of his family’s HRC stock illegally too.

(Wanna place bets on whether or not he’s sent to some West Virginia prison though?)

Meanwhile, the Times is finally abuzz with talk about the symbiosis between lobbyists and lawmakers but who’s surprised by THAT relationship? We legalized lobbying after all.

(But whodathunk lawmakers would be greedy instead of looking out for every citizen’s interests? Amazing!)

SANG IN SHOWER: “The sun’s so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or something...” (Lucinda Williams)

READING: Alternet’s “Fighting GOP Corruption”

LISTENING TO: “Triangle man, triangle man. Doing the things that a triangle can.” (Moxy Früvous)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Government officials and government action are not for sale.” (Alice Fisher, assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, as she suggested that a bigger influence-peddling scandal is about to unfold)
(We should all say a silent thank you that her boss is not former attorney general John Ashcroft.)

172. THE CHURCH OF THE BIG DILDO

From the Archives (December 2005)

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas’ double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.—Medea

Yes that would be me living here in this foreign land where my orchids are sprouting brand new stalks and the clementines I purchased just a few days ago are already beginning to mold.

(What is UP with that? I mean jezzzzuslawd I’m eating three a day!!)

Whole Foods’ produce department has gone way downhill recently (and I still don’t understand why they can’t be bothered to buy locally grown produce when it’s so readily available). I mean, throw some (finely sifted sea) salt over your shoulder in these parts and you’re bound to hit some hippie who went back to the land and has been selling organic rosemary or pig-sniffed truffles or free-range something at the local farmers’ market.

Anyway, so here I am with my short attention span changing topics again when what I wanted to say is that yes, indeedy, this here dykestergrrrl has navigated myself relatively far away from my paternal homeland and you better believe that I only looked back long enough to find those barbecue and cornbread and coconut cream pie recipes.

I was fortunate enough to not desire the tiny strictured life that my family designed for me but, wow, do they keep trying to cram me back into their mold.

In fact, it’s beginning to feel as if they’re stalking me—which, no doubt, means that the church had another save-the-queers-from-themselves drive.

My mother asked what church I attend. (The church of the big dildo, Mom.)

My homophobic Aunt Becky informed me in highlighted all caps that I am going to spend eternity in Hell because I don’t believe every rabidly hateful thing that her minister insists is Jezus’s word and because I “live in unnatural sin.”

Oh. Wait. No. The Baptists don’t concern themselves with Jezus anymore. (He was just too liberal.) It’s all about their so-called literal interpretation of the worduvgawwd now.

(Don’t you wonder in what dank cellar they’ve locked Jezus away? It’s apparently the same cellar where they’ve locked the Christians who took “feed the poor and care for the sick” to heart, since the new Falwell/Dobson/Robertson Jezus impersonator promotes giving huge tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor and fails to provide healthcare for the indigent.)

(And yes I know that there are plenty of good liberal Christians out there who are mighty embarrassed that Pat Robertson and his cronies are managing to speak for them all, but I am talking about the organized Christianists with an obvious GOP agenda here.)

And don’t get me started on my little sister, who converted to Catholicism and believes their spiel about separate and unequal gender roles being part of God’s master plan and who knows just knows that I can be cured of my lust for gorgeous women—one of whom, by the way li’l sister, brings me to ecstatic screaming climaxes on a very regular basis.

(Think about THAT the next time you’re mumbling some prescribed phrase out of your lectionary.)

Meanwhile our local dyke chorus has, for the first time in its 22-year history, elected to perform a traditional holiday concert that includes Jezus songs.

See, many of us are classically trained musicians who really enjoy challenging carols such as Rutter’s “Mary’s Lullaby” and “Lo How A Rose E’er Blooming” or the lovely “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” and it is exceedingly difficult to find any classical carols that don't reference the J-Man.

So we bit the bullet and introduced Jezus into our estrogen mix for just this one concert—only we unknowingly did this the same semester that HRC invited us to perform at their Gospel and Unity event (which they, incidentally, presented to us as inclusive of all organized religions).

Turns out their event was actually an attempt to bring African-Americans into their fold ... and I guess they could only envision African-Americans, even queer ones, as gospel-belting churchgoers.

(Hey, ever heard of Audre Lorde or Essex Hemphill or Pomo Afro Homo?)

The HRC event overflowed with evangelical Jezus-farting, but there was neither hide nor hare of Buddha or Pan or Muhammed or Spiderwoman weaving the world or the magnificent golden carp.

So, understandably, my dyke sister-singers are up in arms now about our apparent conversion.

What was I thinking when I voted to perform this Jezus music in the first place? And is it enough that I opted not to participate in the HRC event (because my Jezus allergy can detect allergens from miles away and I was sneezing the second HRC said the word "gospel"). I also declined to design their publicity material for the same reason, but did perform in our holiday concert because, well, I love Rutter and have not yet convinced the chorus to purchase an SSAA arrangement of “Ave Pudendum.”

But anyway, to make matters worse, the local (queer) MCC church asked our chorus and the local gay men’s chorus to perform at their holiday fund-raiser too and, well, we assumed we'd sing “Deck The Halls” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” etc, but, well, they just delivered a song list to us and it couldn’t be more Christian!

(Whee our next board meeting is sure going to be fun!)

Meanwhile, I miss the days when the Christians that our chorus sang about were the blood-thirsty extremists who murdered 9 million European women during the witch hunts, and so plan to propose that we sing Holly Near’s “I Ain’t Afraid” (of your Yahweh. I ain’t afraid of your Jesus. I ain’t afraid of your Allah. I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your god) and “Did Jezus Have a Baby Sister?” and “Ave Pudendum” at our next holiday concert, as penance.

LISTENING TO: Maggie Sansone’s Ancient Noels

BEST OF SPAM: last longer John (oh baby I do)

140. AMERICAN FATWAH, CONTINUED

From the Archives

(August 2005) So I received an e-mail message from Democracy for America this morning. Instead of calling for an FCC investigation or the filing of criminal charges against Pat Robertson, Democracy for America wants to place a “Thou Shalt Not Kill” ad in Pat’s local newspaper. How effective of them.

I signed their petition, but wrote this:

The FCC fined CBS $550,000 for accidentally airing Janet Jackson's silicone breast during the Superbowl. Call for the FCC to fine Robertson’s so-called Christian Broadcasting Network for using federally licensed airwaves to call for terrorist homicide.

Call for criminal charges to be filed against him for his fatwah.

Insist that he be prosecuted for calling for the murder of a democratically elected head of state.

See US Code, Title 18, Sec 1116: “whoever kills or attempts to kill a foreign official, official guest, or internationally protected person shall be punished” and Sec 878, which makes it a crime to “knowingly and willingly threaten” to commit this crime.

Our government is obligated under international law to prevent and punish acts of terrorism against foreign heads of state when they are conceived of or planned on our soil. See the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, which makes it a crime to commit a “murder, kidnapping, or other attack upon on the liberty of an internationally protected person” [including] a “threat to commit any such attack.”

See also The OAS Convention to Prevent and Punish Acts of Terrorism Taking the Form of Crimes against Persons and Related Extortion That Are of International Significance, of which the US is a signatory. Art 8a obliges “the contracting states undertake to cooperate among themselves by taking all the measures that they may consider effective, under their own laws, and especially those established in this convention, to prevent and punish acts of terrorism, especially kidnaping [sic], murder, and other assaults against the life or physical integrity of those persons to whom the state has the duty according to international law to give special protection, as well as extortion in connection with those crimes.” This convention includes foreign heads of state as internationally protected persons.

Obviously, I didn’t do all that research myself but got most of it from Deborah James’s article on ALTERNET.

Democracy for America did make a good point though when they wrote in their plea for funds that

Robertson's fatwah, calling for the assassination of the president of Venezuela—in the name of keeping access to a "huge pool of oil," among other excuses—exposed the warped values of many religious radicals with the ear of the president of the United States. From efforts to squelch the teaching of sound science in our schools, to the "Justice Sunday" rallies trying to impose religion on the courts, to the quixotic jihad against SpongeBob SquarePants, fundamentalist power grabs make the news and have a huge impact. But they don't have the teachings of any religion we know of—and they don't have us.

Infuckingdeed y’all.

137. AMERICAN FATWAH

From the Archives

(August 2005) I’m in my favorite café having a latte and shaking my head at the latest that idiot Pat Robertson has done to get in the news. You’ll remember that, in 1998, he said that God was hitting Florida with hurricanes because of gay days at Disney (note that queers, not Disney, organized this event). Then he condemned the United Nations for trying to make one world government. And now he is making terrorist statements on TV, telling his loyal Christianists—while no doubt adding that God insists that they should send Pat more money—that the US should assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," he said on the PTL Club (1 million + viewers). "We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. ...You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.
It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Perhaps someone should tell Pat that he uses too many you knows. (Couldn’t his god cure that?) And I guess he’s only a literalist when it comes to making homophobic statements about what the Bible says, since he obviously missed the “Thou shalt not kill” commandment.

Interestingly, the White House has had little to say about this, perhaps because they’re beholden to the Religious Right and Chavez is such an outspoken critic of the shrub that would be king.

This did prompt the following line in Yahoo’s story: "[Robertson’s statements] reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times."

BEST OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: dont you think its dumb? (Well yeah yes I do)

134. AGE OF UNREASON

From the Archives

(August 2005) So yeah I know I should probably just paste a hyperlink here instead of pasting an entire (brief) article, but just quit reading already if you aren’t concerned about the fact that only 28 percent of US citizens believe in evolution but 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of so-called Intelligent Design, the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger every day.

So here’s a damn good article:

WIDESPREAD IGNORANCE
by Sam Harris, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted on ALTERNET August 10, 2005

President Bush has endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of "intelligent design" (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution. This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that "the jury is still out" on the question of evolution.

But the jury is not out—indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born—and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID "theorists" with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Because it is taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United State—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould's notion of "non-overlapping magisteria" served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium.

Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can "rule out" the existence of the biblical God.

There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not "rule out," but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe—that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: "Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus." Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them."

Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs. Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like "God" and "crusade" and "wonder-working power" mean to him. Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House "is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery." This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

A president who regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century—and he’s certainly not talking about the fact that 98 percent of our genes are the same as those of chimps! And, these days, our populace revels in its own ignorance.

Sadly, that describes a good portion of the populace of the deep South (and, yeah, I know I just raised some Southerners' hackles, but they also know that this is true. Plus, I'm from the deep south myself and I choose to live and beat my head against the wall here, so I'm going to say it anyway. Only now it's the entire country, seems like, and not just one region, that's embracing this unreason.

A commentor says “If there ever was an Anti-Christ, I would have to say that it is religion.”

BEST OF SPAM: Find Mr. Right and Keep Him. (No thanks. Saw enough hairy backs at the beach this past weekend.)

JUSTICE SUNDAY?

From the Archives

(April 2005) I'm pasting this entire article because the news is so obscene. We’re already a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy; will we be a theocracy by the time Bush finally leaves office?

FRIST SET TO USE RELIGIOUS STAGE ON JUDICIAL ISSUE
by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 14—As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias [by SC Dixicrat Strom Thurmond-MEDEA], and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.

On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.

On Thursday the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith for an appellate court post to the Senate floor. Democrats say they do not intend to block Mr. Griffith's nomination.

That cleared the way for the committee to approve several previously blocked judicial appointees in the next two weeks.
The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.

"The issue of the judiciary is really something that has been veiled by this 'judicial mystique' so our folks don't really understand it, but they are beginning to connect the dots," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, reciting a string of court decisions about prayer or displays of religion.

"They were all brought about by the courts," he said.

Democrats, for their part, are already stepping up their efforts to link Dr. Frist and the rule change with conservatives statements about unaccountable judges hostile to faith.

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.